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Abstract

The combination of wordplay and subtitling has not been investigated much in the past. Wordplay has an unusual nature which involves its strong dependency on the idiosyncrasies of the language in question. This makes the rendering of wordplay difficult as it often has untranslatable elements in the original which lack linguistic counterparts in the target language; resulting in a need for great creativity by the translator. The rendering of wordplay can also be said to be even more difficult in subtitling than in other types of translation, because many instances of wordplay in screen productions are co-dependent on the visual context together with the dialog. The constraints on time and space together with the difficulty of translating wordplay, means that wordplay unfortunately is a part of the source language that is often at the danger of getting lost in subtitling.

The aim of this study has been to see how wordplay has been treated in authentic subtitled material. I have looked at how often wordplay gets lost in subtitling, how the different types of wordplay have been dealt with, and the individual differences between the subtitlers in the corpus. I expected about 50 % loss of wordplay in the material; the results show an even higher percentage. I also expected that certain types of wordplay would be less frequent in the Norwegian subtitles than others; that was also true. Regarding the individual differences between the subtitlers, my expectations were not fulfilled; there is very little difference between the subtitlers. The results of this study prove that it is possible to explain the differences in the loss of wordplay on the different rates of wordplay that can be translated directly.

The results indicate that there are two factors, among the many that are likely to influence a transition, which are the decisive ones in determining how wordplay is treated in subtitling: the type of wordplay, and the similarities between the languages in question.